Is Google Sandbox Effect Blocking Your Keywords Ranking?

Posted November 9, 2005 • By P Chandra

Google Sandbox Effect Blocking Your Site? Have you created a new website, great content, many quality inbound links, all possible search engine optimization performed, but though your site shows in the result pages, it ranks poorly for your target keywords – maybe you are suffering from the Google Sandbox effect.

Google Sandbox Effect

Some key takeaways from an excellent article by Software Marketing Resource suggest that Google’s sandbox appeared in March of 2004 and was initially known as the Austin update. The new sites will not rank well and sandbox filter will affect almost all new websites. The sandbox filter affects more competitive keyword driven sites

How to Get Out of the Sandbox? The quick answer to this is yes, but you need to have patience and wait. It is only intended to reduce search engine spam.

There are several stories which demonstrate how Google Sandbox has been affecting websites. Search Engine Journal has a story of how SEOmoz escaped the Google Sandbox after 9 months since moving to a new domain name despite over 12,000 natural links from other sites, SEOmoz was only getting 10 or so referrals from Google a day. Recently Problogger exited Google Sandbox and got increased site traffic after getting litle Google traffic for 8 months inspite of many incomming links and after changing their domain name.

So before you register a domain name and shift your blog to new webhosting, consider if simple domain name masking will work for you or else you might get into the Google Sandbox Effect.